Posts by Simon 11

Re: "years of work and important documents"

"I'm not disagreeing with you here but she's go to take on the lion's share of responsibility here"

Applying the same logic to a mechanic replacing the brakes on your car, if you have an accident caused by shoddy advice and a bad job, you must bear the lion's share of responsibility for the accident?

Re: Good for Trump

@SinceYouAsked

I'm not suggesting the government website is how things really work. I'm merely pointing out there are the rules to prevent these visas from being mis-used in the manner described by Trump. 'Fixing' this by changing the law won't prevent companies already breaking the rules from breaking the rules. As I said, laws are useless without enforcement.

@LucreLout

Your friend is entitled to be paid at the higher rate of either the prevailing wage for people doing the same job in the same area (regardless of qualification), or of the wage people of comparable skills and qualifications in the same company employed for the same reason.

Note that this isn't about how much a qualification is worth, it is about whether a qualification is recognised (you are either qualified or not qualified). If the job spec requires a qualification, then the company absolutely recognises that your friends qualifications are comparable to the qualifications of others doing the same role and therefore they are breaking the law by not paying your friend as per the rules outlined for the H-1B visa. The only way I can think of around this is to not require a qualification in the job spec and to officially not recognise qualifications from countries other than the US (though they could still land in hot water, as the US government may formally recognise qualifications that your friend holds).

Re: Good for Trump

WTF?!?

Neither you, nor Trump appear to know what you're on about. From the US Gov website (http://www.dol.gov/compliance/topics/wages-foreign-workers.htm):

H-1B and H-1B1 Specialty (Professional) Workers must be paid the higher of the prevailing wage (average wage paid to similarly employed workers in the occupation in the area of employment) or the actual wage paid by the firm to workers with similar skills and qualifications.

The only way to use H-1B visas to import cheaper foreign labour is to actually break the existing law. Changing this law in the ways suggested by Trump wont stop companies already breaking it from breaking it.

80% of visas being filled by people in level 1 or 2 just means most visas are being used to fill entry level jobs (or that companies are again breaking the law and lying through their teeth to get cheap foreign labour, which law changes won't stop).

Assuming the majority of visas are honestly obtained and filled, there is absolutely no reason to prefer foreign workers over local workers, as they cost the same (in fact probably more, as the companies would generally pay relocation costs, cover the cost of obtaining the visa, etc).

Assuming the majority of visas are fraudulent scams companies are using to cheat locals out of jobs by hiring cheap foreign labour, then changing the law is useless. Laws don't work without enforcement.

Stay away from Gmail

Seriously, I cant reiterate that enough.

I worked for a fairly modern Australian university that migrated from Exchange to Gmail while I was there. It was nasty. The test group were administrators and IT staff and I think a very small group of senior academics.

Turns out that Gmail simply doesnt have the flexibility or customisability that the university needed (for instance, Google limits the number of email addresses you can bulk email at once. They also limit the number of contacts you can have, or at least did at the time). The university was also too small to warrant any attention from Google (5000+ staff, 20,000+ students), so trying to get any issues resolved, or in some instances even investigated, was nigh on impossible (unless Google already had a first line support level write up for a known issue).

When they made the final switch, within weeks the service desk started to melt under the pressure and it never really let up, as we would resolve one thing only to have something else come up.

The devil's in the details

(or small print)

***Warranty for the 200GB capacity point is 5 years or 3.7PB total write capacity, whichever occurs first.

You know, if El Reg reporters are going to turn product spec sheets into "articles", they should at least supply all of the facts (I'm not even going to bother pointing out the multiple inaccuracies in this article).

Re: Firefox already does what he asked

"...because if someone has got to my desktop it's too late anyway."

I keep hearing this and it keeps pissing me off. It's just another way of saying 'It's easier than it should be for people to break into a system when they have physical access, so I'll use that as an excuse to justify not doing anything at all to protect the system, regardless of whether the things that can be done would prevent that person from accessing my most sensitive data, or merely slow them down'.

If everyone stopped being lazy and started actively working on this level of security, we might actually get something that can make a system relatively secure from attackers with physical access to the machine.

Re: I'm sure Tim Cook needs another bonus

"... I'm guessing maybe Bill Gates will be there to great the newbies."

Umm, sad attempt at trolling, or do you honestly not know about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which spends Billions of dollars annually on grants and charitable donations, in order to combat things such as poverty, disease, poor education?

Re: more speculation....

Re: Like PCs? - Help me out here

Market share covers more than just the number of people presently in the market, it also indicates how stable the market is and whether it is growing or shrinking.

If the market is showing strong signs of growth, then it is probably worthwhile investing in the market, because you know that you have a good chance to recover that investment (be it time, money, reputation, whatever), or even make it big. If the market share is falling, the time period for recovering the investment is shorter and the chance of making it big is reduced (if not gone already, when considering the platform argument). If the market share is crashing, sure you may make a bit of money out of the (shrinking) existing user base, but you'll never make it big and you may not even recover your investment.

Another choice would be to ban certain types of invention from patent protection and instead cover them under copyright. I think this method should be used for any software invention.

Patent protection should also be removed from individual components (such as the rounded corners of a screen) and can only be applied to the end product. Policing this would then involve a degree of infringement (the active ingredient in that drug is x, your drug only contains x, it is 100% in breach of the patent - Or, your tablet has rounded corners on its screen and everything else is different, it is 1% in breach of the patent)

It may still be contention. The same physical line connecting your residence to the street doesnt mean you arent going through different equipment at the exchange (which you probably are and even if you arent, your new provider may be paying for x guaranteed bandwidth with a lower user ratio), which is where the contention / congestion typically starts to take place.

A title

Doesnt this give Oracle proof of wrong doing, which allows them to sue Google and hence use discovery processes to gain access to the full source code, in order to see how much wrong doing there has been for this project?

@Magnus

No, it really isnt a good argument.

Google has a history of doing whatever they want to do, regardless of whether it is morally, ethically or legally right to do so, though they do try to stay mostly in the grey regions. This is just another example of this sort of culture.

Google has no intention of destroying the patent system. If they could, I am sure they would hold patents on people breathing, in order to get the royalties such patents generate. Remember, they are a company that invests in pretty much anything and everything, especially if it can be linked to making money.

To say Google has almost no overheads is living in the past. These days they are a massive global organisation that has plenty of overheads.

This suit is going to be long, expensive and bloody, as both sides have very deep pockets and the litigant has a real grievance.